Notabilia

Apathy

Last year, I was talking to someone who told me one of their co-workers sexually assaulted their friend. I asked how she could keep working with that individual.

He didn’t do it to me, she replied.

I think about that interaction all the time, what it encapsulates, what it enables. Monsters are only monstrous when we remain silent, when we go along, when we allow them to continue doing what they’re doing.

It’s the apaths who will destroy this country more than the monsters themselves. Too many of us are apaths. Some of it stems from conditioning, from learned helplessness, and from systems that tell us to remain silent (like those in place here in Utah). I think those folks can change.

Some of it’s from emotional indifference and a lack of concern for others’ suffering. I’m not sure those folks can change. They tend to fall in line with whatever’s happening around them, which is why it’s important for those who lead to be ethical and compassionate.

In that same conversation last year, I explained why I was speaking up about an issue that was important to me. The woman suggested I not say anything at all.

Of course she did.

I didn’t listen. Of course I didn’t.

Whole in Your Wholeness

Sometimes, you travel somewhere and leave something behind: the body of your pain, which is taken into so many mouths and carried into the air and consumed and changed and spread until it becomes one with earth, water, air, and fire. Until it transmogrifies, and you think finally, finally, because you’re ready to let it go. You wanted to let it go a long time ago but now you can, so you do, and your doing becomes something done, something you did, have done, as if the past in all its verb forms exists independent of the present, as if you exist now and only now. And right now, you do. That’s exactly what you do. You are here, sometimes, whole and aware of your wholeness. Say hello to who you are.

Called to Serve

When Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference yesterday, I felt like every poet and writer in the audience was being called to do our best and be our best as creators and as human beings. I felt a sense of purpose and responsibility, the way our country’s leaders used to make me feel when I listened to their most inspiring speeches. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, and I’ve never felt that way as a poet: encouraged to live and write thoughtfully, mindfully, with presence, and with clarity.

Doffered

Meanwhile, locals are sharing a hate flag—you know the one—in Facebook comments on a news story about someone here who’s trans, including one made by arranging four pride flags in a particular way. Tell me two poets misgendering Andrea Gibson over and over at a local literary event is no big deal, especially in this larger context. Tell me I need to be more forgiving. To forget. To get over it, all of it. To at least raise my concerns quietly, privately, and with decorum and grace. Tell me I’m the problem. Tell me.

Quiet never got anyone anywhere other than silenced, gone, or dead. What others say openly will never be a secret I carry. I’m done bouldering men’s shames. They won’t go with me to my grave. Hell, I won’t even have a grave. I’ll be the dust my life partner holds to the Southern Utah wind. I’ll be southwesterly then. You can sing a song to the four elements when the time comes. Right now, there’s work to be done. Do it with me or don’t. Draw scars on the face of the world if that’s your thrust. Make hate not peace if you must. Fulfill your flimsy purpose like a lace doily under a dusty candle in an abandoned cabin in some forgotten town. Be dimity. Go forth and doffer. Tell me again why I bother.

Jacks

Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.

I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.

I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.

I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.

In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, If you do that again … without completing the threat.

I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.

Folding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.

Not About You

A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.

I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.

Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.

This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.

This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.

My Accounts

It’s not easy to write about some of the situations I’ve encountered in poetry. I do it because most people don’t talk about their experiences. Certain things happen and happen again and happen again without anyone knowing what’s happening or that it could happen to them. Or something similar has happened to them, and they feel alone in that experience, unnecessarily so because they are not, in fact, alone. Silence just makes them feel that way.

I support poets and poetry and presses of all kinds, including small presses. I will also continue to advocate for myself and my work. Part of that means speaking out when necessary about problematic situations and encounters. I hope my accounts will help others navigate their own situations and know they aren’t alone if something similar happens to them.

Frictions

I’m thinking about the kinds of frictions marginalized folks experience in the literary community, namely when participating or attempting to participate in things like events, readings, residencies, and literary programs. It occurs to me that things other folks might miss or not understand or not be able to “see” can be experienced very differently by those in marginalized groups and can make spaces unwelcoming, othering, invalidating, and even hostile.

One example from my recent personal experience is the trans erasure associated with someone dropping the letter “T” from the acronym LGBTQ+ and instead saying “LGBQ.” That act changed the way I see the university where I planned to study writing and creative writing at the graduate level because the person who dropped the “T” is affiliated with the institution. Along with other frictions I’ve experienced, I no longer feel welcome at that school. Someone else might not notice an omission like that, or they may think it’s no big deal, but as someone who’s queer, that erasure is both obvious and painful.

I’m interested in the kinds of frictions others have experienced and the disproportionate ways frictions tend to aggregate, not only within one type of marginalization but across various forms of marginalization.

Hope Hall

Now, Hope Hall is an empty and quiet place, one where footsteps echo down tunneling hallways. Bob McDonald, who once stayed in an open barrack on the campus, said “the noise level was huge” when patients were “warehoused” in the mental health ward, back in the 1980s and before. Their cries reverberated throughout the building, he said, and patients pounded on their doors. Some had only an eyeball-sized peephole to the outside world.

And more important, perhaps—the patients had little or no treatment for their illnesses. They were the castaways from generations that didn’t understand them. They were locked up and kept out of sight.

—

From a story about Central State Hospital / Griffin Memorial Hospital, where my mother worked for thirty-five years. We need to seriously evaluate where mental-health care is headed under the July 24 executive order. It’s headed back, not forward. Back to the days of warehousing human beings like sacks of grain. Story link in comments.